I will be acquiring a few sites soon that are done in cold fusion. I'mgoing to be converting them, so how should I go about this. I don't want to lose ranking based on the changes of the filename extensions. Example: contact_me.cfm will be converted to contact_me.asp or something like that. Is that going to screw me over? I'm not worried if it does in the short term, but will the sites "bounce back" over 3-6 months or so? Any tips/guidance muchly appreciated.
Yeah no problem. If you are going to Linux and PHP then it is quite easy (and PHP/Linux is the way to go anyways in my opinion). in your .htaccess file add the following line AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm .cfm You can also do a 303 on all your pages (perm. redirect) which will not hurt you with rankings and the search engines do follow 303s but it is much easier to just change your .htaccess file to tell the server that .cfm files should be treated as php files.
Yes, i'll likely be doing it in php on shared linux hosting. AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .html .htm .cfm What exactly does this do? Does this mean that i can just leave the site as-is, as cfm files? that would be good. I was also thinking about 303s as the sites arent too big...so it woudn't take much to do that up eihter. thanks for the help!
You will want to 301 redirect every page that is currently indexed and your rankings will stay the same (they might take a bounce down before they come back), assuming the pages still have the same content. If you do not have many pages, you can do them manually in your .htaccess: Redirect 301 /index.cfm http://www.yourwebsitedomain.com/index.php